Machine Landscapes

Semester 1, 2013

With Saskia Schut and Dr. Scott Mitchell

Machine Landscapes: a meander through the future now of terra(or) forming, straddling the intersecting overlaps of land art (‘Spiral Jetty’ Robert Smithson, ‘Solar Sintering’ Markus Kayser), mining (open cut, tunnelling, leaching) planetary exploration (Mars Rover, DARPA-DIY Hack Space), robotic architecture (“Olzweg” R&Sie, “Walking City” Archigram, ‘geotextile’ Beesley) in the thick long cooked cooking congee of nature/culture, animal/machine, static/dynamic, we will ponder wonder build machines that make/alter the landscape and consider how this could be employed/deployed. We will plunge into Arduino programming, basic electronics, mechanics/automation. We will speculate and explore through working models testing what could be. We will experiment at various scales with real materials. We will blur model and 1:1 scale with film production techniques to suspend audience belief. We will mimic the gesture of the machine across the paper (landscape) to produce drawings of transformation. Machine Landscapes develops it’s proposition in two parts; a small (massive) machine and a speculative (science) fiction.